[rollcat]

> Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon.

The whole history of PCs is repeatedly proving otherwise. The NES had hardware sprites. Then Carmack & Romero showed up and proved you can have smooth side scrolling in software, on an underpowered CPU. The whole concept of a PPU was thus rendered obsolete. Repeat for discrete FPUs, discrete sound cards, RAID cards (ZFS), and so on.

Specialised silicon will beat general purpose silicon at the given task, until general purpose silicon + software catches up. You need to keep pouring in proportional R&D effort for the specialised silicon to stay ahead.

What keeps GPUs relevant is that they're in fact much more general than what the "G" originally stood for.

[Retric]

CPU’s have integrated a lot of specialized silicon as transistor budgets increased. x86 treats integer and floating point arithmetic as separate things because the math coprocessor used to be a separate and optional chip. Now days it’s GPU cores making the migration, but that’s hardly going to be the end of it.